Introduction: Tourism Development and the Policing of Urban Space in Latin American and the Caribbeanhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fjlca.12101Introduction: Tourism Development and the Policing of Urban Space in Latin American and the CaribbeanG. Derrick Hodge, Walter E. Little2014-10-28T20:00:45.18704-05:00doi:10.1111/jlca.12101John Wiley & Sons, Inc.10.1111/jlca.12101http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fjlca.12101Article389395Resumen

Abstract

The relationships between police and Latin Americans and police and tourists are complex and in constant flux, not least in tourism zones. It would be tempting to analyze tourism police as enforcers of elite interests, but to do so would elide the crucial fact that tourism police and policing practices are situated within dense matrices of power relations. Our ethnographic data indicate that those who are marginalized, ignored, or maligned by the state can in fact exercise agency, use their cultural repertoire to ameliorate state domination, and even develop livelihoods in the tourism economy. Collectively, the essays of this special issue illustrate the multiple and contradictory ways in which policing operates in Latin American tourism sites, often with complicated and unintended social consequences. Placing an ethnographic lens on policing, as a mechanism that alternately protects and disciplines locals and tourists alike, can provide insight into the complexities of both the state and tourism locales. [Space, Latin America, Tourism, Policing, Governmentality]

Abstract

Security is a growing concern of both local residents and international tourists in Antigua, Guatemala. The city was ill prepared for the rise in crime associated with tourism and drug trafficking. Local and national representations of Antigua as a tranquil Spanish colonial town have been out of sync with this reality. The state's response to crime has occurred in relation to Antigua's status as a World Heritage site. Drawing on Taussig's concept of the “nervous system” and Agamben's theory of “state of exception,” I show the limits of Debord's “society of the spectacle” in a transnational tourism context in which residents are preoccupied with crime. By focusing ethnographic attention on policing, I explain that Antiguëños’ and Mayas’ attitudes about the police are ambiguous and relate to opinions about safety and police roles. My analysis highlights how tourism spectacles play out in relation to policing.

Abstract

In this article, I connect covert denial of citizenship rights with tourism development to explain why Panama presents itself as a police-free state. I engage two main concepts: a critical analysis of governmentality in tourism (Hollinshead 1999, 2003) and the concept of tourism as a “world-making” force (Hollinshead et al. 2009; Merrill 2009; Noy 2011; Reis and Shelton 2011). I apply these concepts to the development of tourism in the archipelago of Bocas del Toro to illustrate how the processes of governmentality and world-making are experienced by Afro-Panamanians at the local level when tourism is imposed from above. An exploration of these concepts assists us in grasping the nature of Panama's tourism industry, with its emphasis on demilitarization, but with the practice of denying citizenship rights and maintaining underprivileged groups in their place in the context of tourism development and economic prosperity.

Abstract

Development of the tourism sector saved the Cuban economy from the economic collapse of the 1990s, but it also produced new problems of social control for which existing institutions were inadequate: migration to Havana overburdened urban infrastructure; tourism introduced new values and behaviors that were inconsistent with revolutionary norms; and the Revolution's image was threatened by the emergence of con artists, petty thieves, and sex workers. The solution was the creation of a new police force that operates in tourism zones and monitors Cuban/tourist interactions. Though these “Specialized Police” harass street youth, the ethnographic data indicate that both hustlers and officers share a gender logic that at times renders them collegial. Both hustlers and police occupy a complex and uncertain location in relation to shifting cultural borders of the nation and state. The analysis engages with critical geography and gender performance theory to understand the street youths' words and experiences.

Abstract

Social scientists typically treat policing as repressive and historical centers as impoverished imitations of unmarked social relations. Yet in Salvador, Brazil's Pelourinho Historical Center, police attempts to discipline both tourists and working-class residents, together with these officers’ violent support of attempts to separate people from their practices memorialized as public culture, generate perforations or folds in the musealized landscape. These structures of feeling support the neighborhood's aura of rooted authenticity. In this way they punctuate, and thus veil, the heritage zone's fraught construction and support the ideological goals of Bahia's cultural heritage bureaucracy that claims to safeguard humankind's shared legacies. This emphasis on the productivity of policing is not to argue that such spaces are bona fide tokens of Brazilian pasts or popular vitality, but to suggest the importance of policing in animating supposedly homogeneous spaces.